Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Scripture Lesson: Romans 11:33-35
Follow The Yellow Brick Road
The Wicked Witch Is Dead
The Mind Of The Christian - Week #1
Throughout the next four weeks we will encounter four individuals that we often meet on life’s journey, individuals that we find far too often reflect ourselves. God has laid a straight, golden path for us to walk down. This is a story about those we meet on that path, sometimes leading us off the path, and sometimes helping to pull us down the right path. We explore those that want all the answers, those that want to feel human, and those that want to feel virtuous. We’ll find what God’s word has to say about this, and how only in our Savior do we find our deepest longings satisfied. Notes. Sections in red are meant for the preacher only and not to be printed in service bulletins.
The Mind Of The Christian
- “If I only had a brain.”
We want to know everything. If we were just able to be smart enough, answer the right questions, figure out God and his plans, we’d be happy and satisfied. We even think God owes it to us. And so we come to God demanding nothing but the answers to every question we have in life.
“Is my complaint directed to man? Why should I not be impatient? Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power? Who is the Almighty that we should serve him? What would we gain by praying to him?” - Job 21:4,7,15
Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look around and see. Is any suffering like my suffering that was inflicted on me in the day of his fierce anger? - Lamentations 1:12
- Everyone we meet on the road is searching for answers in the wrong
Some people become Christians because they think they’ll find answers. Some people give up Christ and follow someone else because they think someone else has all the right answers.
The wise man has eyes in his head, while the fool walks in the darkness; but I came to realize that the same fate overtakes them both. I said in my heart, ‘This too is meaningless.’ For the wise man, like the fool, will not long be remembered; in days to come both will be forgotten. Like the fool, the wise man too must die! - Ecclesiastes 2:14-16
- You knew everything you’d ever need to know all along.
Truth is God gave us everything we needed from the very start. God has given us all the answers we’ve ever needed for salvation and for life from the start, and the rest he asks us to entrust to our loving Father.
Although I am less than the least of all God’s people, this grace was given me: to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make plain to everyone the administration of this mystery, which for ages past was kept hidden in God, who created all things. - Ephesians 3:8-9
From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.‘ - Acts 17:26-28
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. - 2 Timothy 3:16-17
Points To Ponder
- Can you think of a time that you looked for answers in the wrong places? How did that end up working out for you?
- Have you ever tried to figure out God’s plans? Or can you think of a time that you told God that he owed you something?
HOMEWORK-Matthew 15